The Dark Days Are Over – It's Time To Get Serious

 

Two babies in a year (or a year and two weeks if you want to be exact).

Three babies in three years.

That was the life that we were thrust into.  I say thrust, but besides for momentarily forgetting how babies are made in the first 3 months following Kyla’s birth – we actually decided to do things this way.

Did deciding these things make living it any easier?  Hell no.

Those early years (especially the ones before Riya turned 18 months) were what I like to call the dark days.  It was rough at the best of times.  I was the most tired that I think I have ever been. Like ever.

But I mentioned the other day that those days are basically almost over.

For so long I used the hardness of those years to become my excuse for everything.

“No, I didn’t make supper today – it was just way too crazy.  What happened?  The usual, Kyla puked all over the bathroom while Riya drew all over the lounge with a crayon.  Let’s have egg on toast again.”  

“How am I supposed to know where your pants are?  Oh wait.  Flipping heck, I totally forgot to do washing for like, the last week.”

“Are you seriously asking me why the house is a mess when I haven’t been able to move for one second without a little person screaming to be picked up, or fed, or changed?”

“We don’t have money to do fix the hole in the floor, we need to buy nappies.”

I may have only slightly exaggerated some of those (but surprisingly not the last one).

Our house was neglected.  Our garden even more so.

When we moved, I vowed that I wouldn’t let our new house fall into our “we don’t have time, we’re too busy raising kids” mantra that had become my default.  But encouraging Seth to do anything on the house meant that he wasn’t spending time with us (and since spending time together is a huge love language of mine that’s a super no go), I never encouraged it.

Before I knew it, I’d half painted the front of the house and then left it like that – for 6 months.  Our garden had turned into a jungle, that I all too frequently lost the children in.

BUT

With every day getting easier (in the sense that I don’t have to do every little thing for them), we can spread our focus to raising our children, but also making sure that we don’t have massive holes in our floor for years.  Plus they don’t want us to be all up in their faces all the time anymore which is pretty awesome.

In the last couple of weeks, we have managed to paint our front door a bright blue, tame the jungle, weed most of the clover (or as I like to call it – the “asshole of the garden”), plant a few plants in a space that has been gathering debris instead and finally finished painting the front of the house.

While there are so many more things on my to do list to make the house more of what we want it to be, I feel like we are over the worst.

 

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One of the reasons I started blogging was to be able to look back and see how far we’ve come, so here’s a look back at posts that I did on this day in the last few years…

2012 – We went for a walk in the park.  It feels like yesterday, but it was 2 years ago!  Can’t get over those chubby cheeks!

2011 – Aaah, I love these kinds of posts.  It reminds me how far I’ve come in my blogging journey – not blogging just to get something out but actually to have something worthwhile to say.

2010 – Two posts in one day (what was I thinking?!)!  Kyla starting to stand all on her own and Riya’s first (Elvis inspired) smile.